Is Reaper Mode going to kill the Game?

[Bjond]

There's nothing magical about level 28.

Casting efficiency sky-rockets in epics. IMHO, there are several reasons: reduced cost by epic leveling bonus, reduced cost by ED features, and better SLAs that are used more often (reduced cost by free metas).

Casting is so much cheaper in epics than heroics that even my melee pm/ek with a puny SP bar starts turning on metas 100% of the time, even Quicken just because it makes casting more fun.

BTW, OP premise is backwards. Reaper is what keeps the game going. No fun without friction.

 

[Gnyxl]

I can agree with argument. If the designers assume we all are using the best builds and make the game harder to accommodate, that is a problem. The purpose of using an OP build should be to circumvent the challenge. You play an OP build when you want the game to be easy, and play other builds when you want more of a challenge. It is indeed a problem when the game is made more difficult because it is assumed everyone is playing a perfectly designed character.

Exactly and then that will further cause an issue as players begin to choose not the characters they *want* to play, but the ones they think can survive the game.

 

[Scott]

Reaper mode is challenging for me, so I always run it at a lower level than my character. Also, I love tacos!

 

[erethizon1]

Do you feel like DDOwiki, puzzle solvers, youtube, and other ways of gaining game knowledge are 'cheating' ?

His position is not that strange to me. Spending money on DDO store points feels like cheating to me. Earning them through favor feels like earning them, while purchasing them feels like paying to avoid playing the game (which is essentially the same as typing in a cheat code to suddenly get stronger even though you didn't earn it). I think most would agree that buying platinum from a third party seller is cheating, yet buying astral shards and converting them through the auction house to platinum is not. They both feel the same to me.

Obviously, I'm not going to accuse anyone of cheating for spending money on the game (quite the contrary, I appreciate their contribution to keeping the game alive), but for me, it circumvents the entire point of playing. For me, DDO is a giant favor run that also happens to reward past lives and reaper points every once in a while. Without favor rewarding currency to buy more of the game, I wouldn't be motivated to keep playing. Past lives and reaper points are not enough of a carrot to keep me going, but a steady flow of cash shop currency and plenty of new things to buy in the store keeps me going. If I got in the habit of buying currency I would lose my desire to play almost immediately because I would no longer benefit from the primary reward (and the only reward that is given out rather frequently). Buying DDO store points would negatively impact my enjoyment of the game in the same way that cheating would. So I understand his point that he feels the same way about copying powerful builds.

 

[erethizon1]

I CAN'T WIN A SUPERBOWL RING! THE WORLD IS UNFAIR!

That line of thinking makes me sad for the human race.

It really comes down to whether you think favor is a super reward that should only be given out to the very best players, or is a common thing that everyone needs and should be accessible to everyone. I think favor is the purpose of the game. It isn't optional to me. It's not playing football without getting a super bowl ring. It's playing football and having the football taken away from you 6 minutes into the game. The football game is no longer playable without a football.

The entire favor system is moronic. If I save the mayor's daughter from a cave full of monsters he is not going to say when I return to town, "Thank you for saving my daughter, but the monsters were not as hard as they could have been, so I only like you 1/3rd as much as I would if they had been harder."

Every quest on every difficulty should reward full favor. The entire system of having partial favor rewards should be scrapped. If you complete a quest, you get the full favor for that quest because you completed the mission and accomplished the goal. The only thing that makes any sense at all as far as partial favor goes, is for doing the quest without doing the optionals. Getting Guard Jung's badge from The Kobold's New Ringleader can offer extra favor, but running on elite instead of normal should not.

 

[erethizon1]

It's much easier to crank out the 250 DDO points for every 1000 favor with R1s. 1st 2K or 3K favor aren't particularly challenging to an experienced player and can be done several times in a month without paying for hearts of woods. Big revenue loss for SSG on every heavily used VIP account. Most VIP players don't even consider the free DDO points to be an important perk give anyone that owns the content can get that favor/ddo points as well

The purpose of the F2P model is so people that spend money can be better and stronger than people that don't. If you make the game unplayable without spending money, then the peons stop playing and there is no one to be better than. Most F2P games give 100% of the game away for free and only sell extra power and cosmetics in the cash shop. DDO makes you pay even for basic content so a way to earn cash shop money in game is absolutely essential to keep the peons in the game (of which I am one). People like me keep other people (that pay money) playing by giving them someone to play with and making the newbie experience more pleasant (since I am always taking newbies through the game).

Plus, occasionally you get people that wouldn't be willing to spend any money to spend money that they wouldn't have if you had hit them with an upfront cost (like when I spent $145 on the Collector's Edition pre-order of Menace of the Underdark, complete with 13k store points to buy most of the quest packs so I could play with my girlfriend who didn't have the patience to earn her points the hard way).

 

[erethizon1]

Why would they bother with Elites when reaper points give the "challenge mode" so many more advantages? Biggest downside to R1 is not being to reenter the dungeon, if you have sufficient reaper points(>10)

Why does the challenge mode give you the opportunity for more saves, HP, SP and free SP and give you the same favor? You should have to run r4 or higher to get favor. It's a formula for genuinely awful lfm experiences in the current state.

Lower levels of reaper should help new players get reaper points faster if they want to lower the gap between new players and experienced ones. The opportunity cost of not giving favor would more than offset the extra RXP. Or vice versa the greater challenge of higher difficulty reapers would justify the one and done aspect of grinding favor with reaper enhancements.

The challenge mode gives you an increased chance of failure (most of us have solo wiped on an R1 dungeon at least occasionally from a pack of reapers or champs, especially at low level) and no extra favor (and thus no extra store points). If farming store points is your goal then elite is the way to do it. Even R1 adds a lot of extra risk and the only reward is some extra reaper exp (but not much). The extra regular exp is of no help since you need to run all the dungeons for favor anyway and so leveling faster is pointless.

 

[DBZ]

Elites won't get you reaper frags so

 

[DBZ]

Just pugged a r1 vod on the main ain't played it in like 2 years was so bad but we did it

3 solids for the win

 

[Ying]

The purpose of the F2P model is so people that spend money can be better and stronger than people that don't.

You're confusing Pay-to-Win with Free-to-Play.

F2P models exist to remove barriers of trying out the game. Paying $70 for a game just to find out it sucks or isn't my style is so 2003. F2P models like DDO also provide a way to earn in-game currency. That currency is a funnel to get players into the DDO Store where they will spend $$$, which is ultimately the goal.

 

[DDO Gaming]

Spending money on DDO store points feels like cheating to me.

The strangest "don't spend money on the game" argument ever. But I am impressed this OP generally is still generating interest despite its nonsensical arguments

 

[Guntango]

Complex is not the right word. Full of pitfalls, yes. It is easy to run into situations that you don't want to be in because there were inadequate indicators that is where you were headed. But no, creating and executing a character that can wipe the floor with the game is not complex, and it is far easier than it used to be.

Complex, meaning made of complicated parts, is exactly the right way to describe the game; it requires a wiki page that's 69x larger than the Chess wiki page because it's complex.

 

[erethizon1]

What is it you think people store on Free accounts

Does a f2p account used for loot storage, logged into several times a day, count towards active account activity? You bet it does

What is it you think people store on free accounts? Everything of value is bound to account.

 

[erethizon1]

I think there's plenty of head room to give away a few past lives, but do you really want to make most of the gear you find immediately obsolete?

I would absolutely love it. I hate playing Barbie dress-up and that is what DDO is. I don't want to change my clothes ever. I want all my power to intrinsically come from my character and not be based on the outfit I put on that day. Giving us a set of gear that levels up with us so we never have to change our clothes sounds like a luxury I would most enjoy (and would fix the need for all those gear mules).

 

[DDO Gaming]

Giving us a set of gear that levels up with us so we never have to change our clothes sounds like a luxury I would most enjoy (and would fix the need for all those gear mules).

I created multiple characters so I wouldn't need to change gear. And you learn that creating a generic character that works with every quest is a luxury

 

[DDO Gaming]

I created multiple characters so I wouldn't need to change gear. And you learn that creating a generic character that works with every quest is a luxury

I stand corrected. You could build something like this [ https://forums.ddo.com/index.php?threads/reaper-endgame-wood-elf-frenzied-berserker.2179/#post-26253 ] which would work for most quests

 

[T.O.]

Reaper mode is challenging for me, so I always run it at a lower level than my character. Also, I love tacos!

If there is a person that doesn't like tacos. I don't want to know them. I put reaper sauce on my tacos.